This is a rather surreal adventure. A lot of it works, but some descriptions left me scratching my head ("unerring points of light", "incredibly naked" and "heat rising like weightless gelatin from empty streets" sound like the author is trying a little too hard to be surreal). The ending was somewhat bewildering too (in fact, I thought I had died, and reloaded to see where I went wrong).

The plot is pretty simple, it took me about twenty minutes to get through it. There was only about half a dozen locations, and not many more objects.

There is no command line, which makes it easy to trawl through every possibility when playing, but really there were no puzzles anyway, and I think that that worked well enough. There was no compass either, and directions were done via objects, which was a good idea.

The fish mosaic interlude was very well done. On the other hand, the sudden death in the atrium is annoying (the game title is a clue, but even so...).

Technically it was faultless as far as I noticed, but it was basically linear, and there really was not much too it.

There was a lot to like about Pest, but it did have some annoying aspects too.

Although I did not finish it (it really is a good idea to include a walk-through for competition games), there was significantly more to this than Worship the Pig, the other competition game, which I played first.

It starts off with a lot of "Press any key" that does get a bit wearing, followed by a fair bit of time playing "guess the verb" only to discover there was no verb, which was annoying too. There were bits later that were real guess the verbs, and did eventually cause me to give up (so be aware this review is based on a part of the adventure - I got as far as getting a twig).

Like WtP this was a linear game (as much as I played anyway), though I think that is more forgivable in a text adventure, rather than a CYOA. On the plus side, it was well put together. It was free from spelling and grammar mistakes as far as I could see, and no obvious bugs (aside from needing more synonyms).

What was good was the use of a rat as the protagonist. Sure, being an animal is not completely original, but it did give a nice twist to the theme (and I think that that is a benefit of having a theme; it encourages people to have that twist). The use of smell and listen were done well to enhance the "rattiness" of the story.